Choose Inclusive Justice

From The Living Church-

As a priest of the Diocese of South Carolina I have watched my bishop, the Rt. Rev. Mark J. Lawrence, work with good faith and at great personal cost to keep the diocese, as he says, “intact and in TEC.” I believe that but for the personal deference the members of this diocese feel toward their bishop, many more parishes would have taken formal action to leave the Episcopal Church.

Bishop Lawrence is now the subject of complaints under the revised Title IV that he has abandoned the communion of this church. The list of complaints, dominated by thought crimes and guilt by association, reads like a long-lost text from the Joseph McCarthy era. The only charges with some small semblance of plausibility involve the rejection by the diocesan convention of the revisions to Title IV and the enactment of diocesan legislation removing accession to actions by General Convention which the diocese regards as contravening the Episcopal Church’s own constitution.

Leave to one side the confusion between the actions of the bishop and the actions of the convention. Had these pieces of legislation not been enacted a wave of parishes would have left the Episcopal Church in South Carolina. In my view the diocese has pursued a policy which has aimed at maintaining the highest degree of possible communion with General Convention, given the deep consternation of so many in the diocese at the direction of the Episcopal Church.

More here-

http://www.livingchurch.org/news/news-updates/2011/10/21/choose-inclusive-justice